How Southwest High School could reopen as a neighborhood middle school

Editor's Note: This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit news organization serving Missouri and Kansas. The Star is republishing up to two stories a week as part of a new partnership with The Beacon.

A shame. A waste. Maddening.

The thoughts of neighbors and alumni of the shuttered Southwest High School building run from resigned to exasperated.

The brick structure in Brookside is huge and still beautiful, with six three-story columns flanking its front doors.

Neighbor Jane Aylward remembers bringing her children to Wednesday afternoon planetarium shows. When her husband was young, neighborhood kids took swimming lessons in the indoor pool.

Pat Titterington, who graduated from Southwest in 1967, worked in a public library branch in the building as a student. He still lives nearby and returns to show off the refurbished monument his class rededicated in 2023, made of stones from the original White House.

But since it last closed in 2016, the building has sat mostly empty, occasionally rented out. Neighbors use the track-and-field area — fenced but unlocked — as a dog park. On a hot September day, paper snowflakes were still stuck inside a second-story window.

Everything could change if Kansas City Public Schools makes Southwest its new middle school.

A draft of a KCPS building plan names the former high school as one of three options. The other choices are new builds on the Southeast campus or the former Bingham Middle School site.

The board could vote on a proposal in November, then ask voters to approve a bond in April.

Alumni, neighbors and public school advocates generally like the idea of the building being used — at least in theory — but they say a school reopening needs to be handled with care.

Southwest’s last few decades have been tumultuous, with multiple closures and reopenings that brought challenges to the neighborhood. The latest attempt to reopen the school as a KCPS-charter hybrid failed, leaving those who’d pushed for the move frustrated and a little distrustful.

“Our experience tells us that the school district does not have a solid plan as far as what to do with that building, and saying that it’s going to be a third junior high, we just don’t believe it,” said Michael Jantsch, president of the Armour Fields Homes Association. “It’s not practical, possible (or) cost effective and the history shows that that’s not really what they intend to do with it.”

Others can’t help but see the potential.

Aylward, another Armour Fields resident, wants to see the grounds spruced up and lights turned on, to hear the sounds of traffic and band practice, and “just kind of have a rhythm to the day.”

“I’m sure (to) the people who drive by, it’s just constantly bringing back what used to be,” she said. “It would be better to have new things going on.”

How did we get here?

Built nearly 100 years ago, Southwest High School sits on 12.5 acres at the corner of Wornall Road and West 65th Street.

It’s seen as a former “crown jewel of the whole school district,” Jantsch said.

But that didn’t protect it when the district saw enrollment drop from its peak in the 1960s, along with teacher strikes and declining achievement. A lengthy desegregation case that started in 1985 poured money into the district but failed to achieve its goals.

Nancy Livers, a longtime neighborhood resident and retired preschool teacher, said her daughter graduated from Southwest. But she sent her next child to private school.

“There was just so much turmoil,” she said. “I spent a lot of time trying to advocate and see things get better, and they just didn’t.”

Titterington also turned to private school for his children, starting in the 1980s.

“I couldn’t believe, quite frankly, that I was sending kids to a different school system than the one I grew up in, even though, at the time, I was living just two blocks from where I grew up,” he said. “I just didn’t want to take the chance on the education not being consistently good.”

By the late 1990s, Southwest started to close and reopen in different forms. A report from Flatland says it closed in 1998, 2005 and 2016. It spent some time as a charter school and most recently operated as a KCPS early college program.

A group called Uniting at Southwest called for the building to open as a hybrid KCPS and charter school. The district indefinitely ended negotiations in 2019, leaving advocates frustrated.

Crissy Dastrup, who was part of the group, said it’s an open question whether the neighborhood will be able to look past previous problems and failed attempts to collaborate.

“Can Brookside believe and hope that this time things will be different?” she asked.

What it would take to reopen Southwest High School

The transformation from a high school that once enrolled more than 2,000 students into a modern middle school of perhaps 600 to 800 students would come with challenges and expenses.

That’s part of the reason the district is also considering other options, said Jesse Lange, the manager of planning and real estate for KCPS.

KCPS hasn’t settled on a precise plan for modifying the building, which makes it hard to know how much it would cost or how the price would compare to building a new school.

A district presentation in mid-August estimated a wide range — $40 million to $70.6 million — for the project of moving sixth graders into middle schools.

If it picks Southwest, KCPS will have to decide what to do with excess space.

Other districts have put offices or housing in oversized schools or torn down parts of the buildings, Lange said. KCPS could also mothball sections, meaning they’d be preserved but would stay closed.

Some neighbors suggested adding early education or a senior center.

Southwest would also need updates to align with modern education, like room for project-based learning, technology and group work rather than students sitting in rows, Lange said.

While the building is huge, its grounds are on the small side.

The school would have to squeeze in enough parking, athletic fields and space for outdoor learning, Lange said. It would also have to figure out how to make traffic circulation work during pickup and drop-off times.

Aylward, one of the neighbors who would like to see the school reopen, said concerns with previous uses of the school included violence within the school, parents dropping off kids across busy streets and students leaving the school to wander the neighborhood.

She hopes a reopened school would have better security.

Lange said times have changed.

“The stance that we take in school safety is different,” he said. “We have to have secured entry to all of our schools.”

Jantsch, the neighborhood association president, said he’d rather see the building stay closed than for reopening to cause problems in the neighborhood again.

“I’d love for them to figure out something to do with it, but right now, I’m just perfectly happy when nothing’s being done to it,” Jantsch said. “We’re better off having nothing be there than something that doesn’t work.”

Potential impact

The empty Southwest building isn’t a problem, several neighbors told The Beacon. But they want to keep it from deteriorating.

“I see what happens to old buildings that are not used,” said Fred Gambino, who lives within a block of the school. “They start to be abandoned. They start to be vandalized. So this building probably has another five to 10 years before it’s going to become an eyesore.”

Livers, his wife, said she worries that “it’s going to become something that they just demolish, and there’s no reason for that.”

So, Lange said, making it a middle school could preserve a distinctive historical building.

Having a third neighborhood middle school — one where students attend based on where they live rather than applying to a special program — would let KCPS move sixth graders out of elementary school, something it’s wanted to do for years.

And having that school south of Brush Creek would give some students an option that’s closer to their actual neighborhoods, though it would still draw from a wide swath of the district.

KCPS hears feedback that school location matters for families as they choose where to send their children, Lange said.

Currently, the southernmost neighborhood middle school in the district is Central Middle School, between Linwood Boulevard and 33rd Street.

That’s eight or nine miles from some of the district’s southern elementary schools like Hartman and Hale Cook. Those schools have plenty of families enrolled, but they might not see a path forward with KCPS during middle school.

“If you do want to get some of those families reengaged, a southern middle school is a spectacular idea,” said Leslie Kohlmeyer, executive director of Show Me KC Schools, which helps families navigate their many education options. “There’s so much history in that building. There’s so much community support around something being there.”

Mike Zeller, a Brookside resident who was one of the leaders of the Uniting at Southwest movement, said he’d be excited to see Southwest reopen.

In a district where some families with children can move away, pay for private school or send children to free public charter schools, KCPS has to compete.

A school located in a neighborhood like Brookside, “where families with choices feel more comfortable,” might attract more families to the district and create a school with high socioeconomic diversity, Zeller said. He said that’s important for students.

But success also depends on identifying parent leaders to support the school rather than a top-down approach, he said.

Gambino is optimistic that a new version of Southwest can be better than what came before.

“Our city planners and our board planners and all the rest, hopefully, are getting a little smarter,” he said. “They won’t make the mistakes they’ve made in the past, and they can keep this an effective, safe and developing school that makes the children better than they were before they attended.”